Prisoner Abuse Is Avoidable
Daniel P. Mears
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports,
and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration.
The views expressed are those of the authors and should
not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its
funders.
Document date: June 16, 2004
Released online: June 16, 2004
President Bush has vowed to demolish, with the assent of the Iraqi government, the Abu Ghraib prison and
replace it with a new maximum-security prison. Whatever symbolic value the gesture has, it almost certainly
will do nothing to stem inmate abuse at the new prison or in other U.S.-run Iraqi prisons. The faulty
reasoning—endemic in U.S. criminal justice policy—is that we can build ourselves out of a problem. In reality,
unless other critical steps are taken, prisoner abuse will continue unabated.
Consider first the flawed assumption that punitive incarceration policies work. We are indisputably a leader in
this arena: As of 2002, the country imprisoned 476 men and women for every 100,000 residents, almost four
times the rate found in other democratic countries; worldwide, only Russia incarcerates more people per
capita. And few countries have invested as heavily as the United States in supermax prisons, fortresses where
difficult inmates can be confined indefinitely in isolation for 23 hours a day. Have these policies worked?
Hardly. Our crime rates are still substantially higher than those in most industrialized countries, and inmate
abuse is, if anything, worse in our supermax prisons than in regular prisons.
One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome. So, with the stakes
so high, why invest in a new prison and expect abuse to disappear? Why not instead focus on the conditions
that actually give rise to abuse?
Take overcrowding, a known cause of prison violence. At Abu Ghraib, the inmate-to-guard ratio was 15-to-1,
compared with 3-to-1 in American civilian prisons. Yes, the military is releasing many inmates from Abu
Ghraib, but there is no indication that overcrowding won't immediately return—indeed, it remains a problem
in the United States, despite the dramatic growth in prisons.
Another ticket to abuse is reliance on administrators and troops largely untrained in prison management. The
soldiers at the center of the Abu Ghraib scandal included mechanics, pizzeria managers, and recent high
school graduates. Few were trained to be professional guards, much less to interrogate inmates. And many,
expecting to return home, were demoralized when they were sent instead to serve at Abu Ghraib. A new
prison means less money for training and giving a needed break to exhausted guards.
Consider, too, that prison work hardens people. Ted Conover, a journalist, recounts of his one-year stint as an
employee at New York's Sing Sing prison that guards were taught to be "warehousers of human beings." In
such a climate, prisoner abuse and degradation are not only allowed but encouraged. And the more punitive
the setting—as with supermax prisons, Abu Ghraib, and its maximum-security reincarnation—the more likely
this climate is to flourish, especially when the marching order is to treat inmates as terrorists.
Perhaps most pernicious is the lack of oversight in Iraqi prisons. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the Abu
Ghraib administrator, rarely visited the prison, and numerous accounts point to lingering confusion about who
exactly was in charge. Without oversight and accountability-and with leadership promoting questionable
tactics of interrogation—what's to ensure that untrained, stressed-out guards treat inmates humanely?
Recreate these conditions in any prison and widespread, serious abuse will result. The fault in Iraq clearly
does not lie solely with a few soldiers.
The Stanford University prison experiment conducted over 30 years ago showed that healthy adults require
little prompting to engage in the kinds of physical and psychological abuse reported in Iraq, so convicting a
handful of "bad apples" isn't the solution.
Given that a full year has elapsed since the Red Cross and others first raised concerns about prison conditions
in Iraq, intensive, multifaceted intervention is needed. The recent attempts to reduce overcrowding in Iraqi
prisons is an important first step. But rather than build a new prison, the administration should install
professional prison managers and trained staff. The military should not ask guards to interrogate inmates, and
interrogators, whose goals and practices undermine traditional prison operations, should not be allowed to set
prison policy. Inmate-grievance protocols—standard in U.S. prisons—are needed. Guards who abuse inmates
must be swiftly punished. And, because Iraqi citizens and inmates now distrust U.S. prison authorities and
guards, the military needs an international oversight board with on-site representatives to monitor prison
conditions independently and maintain clear lines of accountability from the bottom to the top.
Anything less than a systematic, all-fronts approach invites failure. Iraq and its prisoners deserve better. And
if the United States is to effectively promote democracy and preserve its reputation as a standard-bearer of
basic civil rights, we must do better.
Daniel P. Mears is a researcher at the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and is conducting a
national study on super-maximum-security prisons. The views expressed are those of the author and should
not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Other Publications by the Authors
Daniel P. Mears
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